> The tech company [Carpe Data] [0] looks at anything publicly available on social media<p>Keyword being public. I've never understood why people get so upset about this sort of thing. You are responsible for anything you choose to post publicly.<p>My feelings would be different if it involved fake accounts friending users and seeing items meant only for their "friends."<p>[0] This article is basically an ad for Carpe Data. May as well link to their site: <a href="https://carpe.io/" rel="nofollow">https://carpe.io/</a>
A friend of mine worked as a private investigator for years after his dream of entering law enforcement didn't pan out. His job was mostly investigating insurance claims. He would actually drive his car and park near the home of the claimant for days and take photographs of any activity that would tend to support or disprove their disability claim. He's moved on to another career now, mostly because the career path in that field was not great.<p>I'm not seeing how this is more invasive. I mean, people are making certain content public. Having a PI parked up the block in a car with tinted windows seems much more invasive and that is business as usual and legal for the insurance industry.
We use facebook all the time in my bank to check on fraud/claims of stolen credit cards.
Once a customer claimed a stolen card but it was used every day at a specific parking lot. Said customer would post "Checking into work at xxx" every day on facebook where the specific parking lot was xxx's parking lot.<p>Needless to say I don't have a facebook account or post anything using my full name anywhere public.<p>The scary part will be when the insurance companies buys a direct feed into private posts from facebook or google sometime in the future.
A good faith effort might be to provide two parallel offers: One based on using the social media meta data coefficient and its commensurate reduced fraud rate, a second tier without social meta data coefficient and obviously without the reduced fraud discount.